Meet Sally, the Robot Who Makes Perfect Salads

Chowbotics Inc. claims that its device can make a salad
faster and more precisely suited to your caloric desires than a human can.

by Kate Krader April 4, 2017, 6:00 AM PDT

Silicon Valley’s newest celebrity chef goes by just one
name, Sally. This chef has just one specialty: salad.

Still, Sally will make you the most perfectly
proportioned salad you’ve ever eaten: through science. Sally is a
green-and-brown robot, a brand-new creation from Chowbotics Inc. (that’s a real
name) and a major new player in a potential multi-billion market for
food-service robots.

Sally occupies about the same amount of space as a dorm
room refrigerator, and uses 21 different ingredients—including romaine, kale,
seared chicken breast, Parmesan, California walnuts, cherry tomatoes, and
Kalamata olives—to craft more than a thousand types of salad in about 60
seconds, while the customer watches the process. The machine weighs in at 350
pounds, making it more appropriate for industrial settings than for home
kitchens at the moment. “Sally will be going on a diet,” said its creator,
Deepak Sekar, 35, founder of Chowbotics Inc., looking into his and Sally’s
future.

The benefits of Sally are manifold, according to Sekar.
“Sally is the next generation of salad restaurant,” he claims, comparing it to
chains such as Chopt and Fresh & Co. For one thing, a robot can make salad
faster than a human can. Also, you will know precisely how many calories your
salad is delivering; there won’t be the problem of consuming one piled high
with garnishes that turn out to be more fattening than a burger. And it’s more
hygienic to have a machine prepare your salad than to have multiple people
working on a line—or worse still, a serve-yourself salad bar.

Sally does require a human set of hands to prep the
ingredients that go into its canisters, which are then installed in the robot.
(Sekar called the process of chopping ingredients in the machine "too
complicated right now," although it's something he promises for the
future; he offered an analogy: "It's like paper getting stuck in a
printer; it shuts down the process.")

This spring, Sally will debut in Silicon Valley, at Mama
Mia’s, a fast-casual restaurant in Santa Clara, Calif., and at the corporate
cafeteria at H-E-B Grocery Co. in Texas. The public launch will come on April
13 at co-working space Galvanize in San Francisco, where the public will be
able to order Sally's salads.

Sally’s current list price is $30,000; there will be an
option to lease one for about $500 per month. Chowbotics will start delivering
pre-orders of Sally in the third quarter.

Exactly how many calories are in that salad? Sally can
tell you.Photographer: Kristen Loken

Sekar hopes to see Sally installed soon in hotels, where
business people check in late and room service is dreary, as well as at
convention centers, airports, and gyms. Sally will be a key amenity for fast
food chains such as McDonalds, exponentially expanding the array of fresh
offerings. “If a location installs Sally, they’ll have a thousand kinds of
salad, using fresh ingredients, while their kids are eating Big Macs and fries.”
He noted that the ingredients are fresh and kept in refrigerated
compartments—stored better than at many salad bars. And then there's the
millennial-oriented, ‘eat-o-tainment’ opportunity of watching a salad be
assembled by a machine.

According to Sekar’s plans, Sally’s next incarnation will
be as an instantaneous deliverer of ethnic foods—Chinese, Mexican, or
Indian—possibly even breakfast, depending on the demand. Much farther down the
line, Sekar envisions home versions of Sally. “Remember the first computers in
the ‘60s were the size of a room. An affordable home food robot might not take
decades to create, but it won’t be next year.”

Sekar built the first prototype of Sally in 2014. “ I’ve
always believed that cooking is fun. But during the week, life is so rushed
between work and family. When I looked at time I spent cooking, 85 percent was
spent doing repetitive tasks, like chopping. I wanted to do something else with
that time.” His first robot focused on prepping the Indian food that he and his
wife cooked at home, such as spiced, fried cauliflower. The owner of more than
a dozen McDonald's in the San Jose area, Cosme Fagundo, was impressed enough to
help Sekar bring it to market.

Chowbotics has $6.3 million in funding from such notable
venture capital sources as Techstars and Foundry, the company behind Fitbit and
3D printers. “The machine I created for Indian cooking looked like a modified
3D printer,” noted Sekar. “But instead of plastic shapes, it was making food.”
Now Rich Page is executive chairman at Chowbotics; Page built some of the first
Macs at Apple, and worked with Steve Jobs at NeXT. “Sometimes he’ll look over
my shoulder and say, ‘Steve made that same mistake 20 years ago, so I think I’m
doing something right,” laughed Sekar.

Ayers, who owns Calafia Café in Palo Alto, Calif., is a
salad specialist who is also used to making food in mass quantities. (By the
time he left Google, in 2006, Ayers was serving 4,000 lunches and dinners a day
in 10 cafes across the Google campus.)

“A few of the things that I love about robots is that
they don’t come in late, they don’t talk back, and they’re always accurate,”
said Ayers over the phone. “And the labor savings.”

Ayers doesn’t lose sleep over the inevitable loss of
kitchen jobs in Silicon Valley “I don’t feel like I’m betraying my brothers and
sisters by replacing them,” he said, resolutely. “It’s happening in every
industry now. You can either fight it, or be on the team that makes it happen.”
He added: “People will find other things to do. Like fixing salad-making
robots.”

At Google, Ayers said, he first entertained the idea of a
food robot. “Engineers are notorious for never launching anything on time.
They’d come down and see me in the kitchen, and I was always on time. They
said, ‘Imagine what you could do with a robot.’” When Sekar approached him, he
got on board.

Ayers and fellow former Google chef Kelly Olazar have
since programmed a few specialty salads. These include:

The few items you won’t find in a Sally-made salad
include, curiously, avocado—one of California’s signature ingredients. "It
doesn't interact well with the machine," explained Ayers, presumably
because the soft flesh makes it hard to apportion via automation. Sliced
cucumbers are missing, too, though Sally can dice them. Chopped salad is off
the list. And though Sally is currently stocked with romaine, Parmesan, and
croutons, there's no Caesar salad dressing—yet. Sally's ingredients will change
periodically, so the team reported that Sally might soon be dispensing Caesar
salads.

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